Last weekend, six months on from the death of our mother, and six years on from the death of my father, my brother and I were as ready as we would ever be to undertake the abject task of dismantling their home. Anyway, because my mother had died without leaving a will, it took that long under Scottish law for the house to be ours. Which was just as well, in a way, because it gave us time to get used to the strange, disorientating fact of our middle-aged orphanage.

For me, this had been the family home since I was 10. For David, since he was six. Our parents had lived there together for 35 years and my mother for a further five, alone and heartsick. By last weekend, it hadn't been lived in for 14 months, apart from eight difficult days when my mum had been briefly discharged from the hospice in which she died.

That was odd, in itself. My parents had been compulsively security-conscious, and had not liked leaving the house empty, even for a couple of days. Even when they'd been persuaded to do so, my mother, particularly, would fret about burglars. "Look, Mum," we wanted to say. "More than a year, and no burglars. Think of all the holidays you missed."

Plus, my mother had been passionately houseproud. How astonished she'd have been by the dust – such a hesitant, delicate film. She'd lived her whole life as if failure to run the Hoover over the carpet for just one day would bring down a landslide of filth and decay.

As for the pile of post behind the door, such a thing had never happened. Among the circulars were a few letters from companies threatening legal action for non-payment of a couple of overlooked bills. No bill remained unpaid when my mother was alive. Even the arrival of a red bill was not to be countenanced. Their lives, like their cupboards, were ordered and disciplined.

Some of the things in those cupboards had sat in the dark, lurking, for all of their married lives. The incomplete harlequin tea-set, which had been my grandmother's. How many times had my mother told me she wanted me to have it when she was gone? It's in my cupboard now, and I don't know if I'll ever use it either. It had been guarded so well that it's achieved a status that's something akin to a holy relic.

I took the little sideboard – always referred to as "the bureau" – with the glass doors that had always held the dolls. I took the dolls. They were mine – again – at last. Even in the 1960s, my parents had set themselves against holidays. They scorned those who chose to go abroad on packages – the dreadful heat, the awful food, the foreign languages. "I see the Mackies are back from Spain," I remember my mother saying. "They're not very tanned, are they? Probably couldn't take that fierce sun." But whenever someone was going away, she'd ask them to bring back a doll in national costume, "for Deborah's collection". Enquiring as to their ownership, once I had a home of my own, it was made clear that the collection was not mine but ours. I could have them when she was gone. And I do. I loved them as a kid and I love them now. They're kitsch, I can see that. But not to me.

I took the crochet. Well, most of it. If you'd unraveled all the crochet in that house, the yarn would have girded the world. What weird secrets people keep from their families. Mum always had a bit of crochet on the go, especially after her arthritis made knitting difficult. "What do you do with all that crochet, Mum," I'd asked her once. "It's for charity," she'd said. I nodded approvingly. But we'd found tons of the stuff, nevertheless, in the bottoms of wardrobes, in laundry baskets we'd assumed were for laundry, under the beds in plastic boxes – scarves, shawls, bed-jackets, doilies, little women that go over loo rolls, even four substantial blankets. I now must have south London's most impressive hoard of crochet. There was an unfinished scarf in her crochet bag. It made my brother and I so sad: that sense of a life rudely interrupted, without notice, with things started but not finished. That's what brings the tears back.

David took the chest of drawers – always referred to as "the tallboy". It was part of the "bedroom suite" they'd bought when they married: wardrobe, dressing table, tallboy. I'd had a little one, too, which was also still there. It was striking how the stuff from their early married lives was of better quality. More recent furniture had plastic veneer or synthetic fibre. The wool carpets of my childhood had gradually been replaced with nylon. My parents had fallen for modernity, hook, line and sinker. Nothing they'd bought after 1980 was really made to last.

Except the house – and even that isn't strictly true. Those houses – wooden and always locally called "the timbers" – had been built as temporary homes after the second world war. Yet they've lasted better – with bigger rooms and more generous gardens – than homes like our previous flat, which was built much later, and is already long gone.

God, the energy my mother put into getting that house. Siblings of different sexes were expected to share a room until one of them was 10, at which point the council would rehouse the family. You were allowed two refusals and had to take the third offer. I remember going to look at prospective new homes – one with a dead mouse in a neat pile of swept-up droppings, another with human excrement smeared on the walls. My fastidious mother was appalled. So, to head off the horror of the offer we couldn't refuse being worse than the previous two, she'd scoured the streets looking for empty houses (the good ones, by amazing coincidence, she said, seemed always to go to people with some kind of local government connection), until she'd found that one, and haunted the housing office until they gave in and let her have it.

I remember the day we moved in. It was magical. The garden – which was huge for a council house, even then – was full of self-seeded lupins in all colours, as high as me. There was a robust strawberry patch – the start of the jam-making years. When the strawberries were ripe, we'd gorge on them for weeks, and still have enough left over to make jam to last until the next summer. They had put most of it to grass in recent years, and added a plum tree – the plum chutney years. But I took some pots, containing some of the plants, or at least their descendants, that had already been growing in the garden on that glorious day in 1972.

My parents had been appalled when right-to-buy was introduced. They believed, rightly, of course, that it would change the nature of social housing fundamentally, with the better stock moving into private hands, and only the mousy or shitty places left for people who rented. But as the years and the redundancies rolled by, they'd succumbed, and bought the place. They'd started to feel that their own principles were making fools of them. It's hard to swim against the tide.

We took some daft stuff from that house, my brother and I, like ancient school projects that were falling apart. It seemed awful to bin them when they'd been saved so long. My brother took my dad's last set of golf clubs, and the trolley, even though a) the fast pace of golf-club technology means they're probably obsolete already; b) his flat is tiny and he has absolutely no room for them, and c) he never plays golf any more, and isn't likely to, because the whole culture of the game is different down south. But John loved his golf. It drove my mother nuts. We each have a box of his personalised golf balls, and I have the brass tee that he'd turned at work. It only survives because the cup at the top was a bit too narrow and the balls would topple off in a breeze.

And their ashes – the last vestige of my parents' corporeal being, each in a plastic bag inside an ugly brown plastic so-called "urn" from the Co-op Funeral Service. Those had to be attended to as well. We sprinkled a few of my dad's at the 18th hole at Shotts, his golf club, and mingled the rest, scattering them at the falls of Clyde, a beauty spot we all loved and had always continued to visit as a family, right to the end. The Christmas before Dad died, he walked to the top with us, seemingly as vigorous as ever. I took my mother there on the last day out we had before she died.

Later, when something compelled me to check my mother's empty handbag one last time, I found a little pill-box in it, which I couldn't open because the clasp was stuck. David got it open, and inside were some of my father's ashes. My mum must have clung on to that little box after he'd gone, to comfort herself. She must have gripped it so hard that she jammed it. God love her.

And that's that. We'll never enter that house again. A new family will live there, and one day, perhaps, the children of that house will find themselves doing what we just had to do and saying some profoundly final goodbyes. Daunting and terrible a task as it was, my brother and I found an odd satisfaction or serenity in making that final inventory of our family lives. So I find myself hoping that those new children will indeed one day do the same. My parents moved to that house as young people, and lived there happily ever after. They never stopped feeling lucky and blessed to be nesting there, not for a day (until illness and death took them from it). Which, really, is pretty wonderful.